Diane Lane apologizes because she has arrived a little late for her early morning interview, and her hair is still damp. She hasn't had time to apply her makeup, and she is dressed casual enough to do household chores.

Here's my response: Who cares?

The 45-year-old actress is still so beautiful that she is allowed to meet an interviewer any way she likes. A robe and curlers would work.

Lane, who is married to actor Josh Brolin (that makes Barbra Streisand her step-mother-in-law), is promoting a movie that is bringing her the best notices of her long career, which began at 13 when she appeared opposite Sir Laurence Olivier in "A Little Romance" – a role that landed her on the cover of Time magazine.

In her teens, she seduced an entire generation of teenage boys in such films as "Rumble Fish" and "The Outsiders," and successfully made the transition to adult actress, most notably in the 1989 miniseries "Lonesome Dove" and the 1999 film "A Walk on the Moon."

Most recently, she has appeared in a mix of romantic comedies ("Must Love Dogs") and romantic dramas ("Under the Tuscan Sun").

In "Secretariat," which opens Friday, Lane plays real-life horse breeder Penny Chenery, who fought her way to the top of a male-dominated world when her legendary horse won the 1973 Triple Crown, becoming the first horse in 25 years to win the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and the Belmont Stakes in the same year.

Chenery, who is 88 and lives in Boulder, Colo., was ridiculed by the media and competitors as a housewife pretending to be a horse breeder, despite her impressive pedigree. She also was stifled by a husband who didn't understand her love for the sport in general, and this horse in particular.

In this interview, Lane describes her first meeting with Chenery, and what it's like for the actress to face an empty nest at home with a daughter in her last year of high school.

DIANE LANE:You look familiar.

THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER: We had lunch at the Peninsula hotel a few years back. It's OK if you don't remember.

DIANE LANE: No, I knew we had met, but I just couldn't remember the place.

Q. During that lunch, we spoke of your daughter, who must be a teenager by now?

A. We're looking at colleges (a look of mock horror).

Q. That brings up an interesting topic. At her age, you already were legally emancipated from your parents and ...

A. I wasn't emancipated.

Q. Really? I thought I had read something about that?

A. You can't believe anything you read on the Internet, even if they're quoting from a knowledgeable source. I'm curious what else you've read.

Q. I've read that you were shuttled back and forth between your divorced parents when you were a child.

A. That's like 80 percent of the kids I knew growing up because marriages don't always hold up statistically.

Q. Of course. But that still must have had an impact on your childhood?

A. It probably made me much more sensitive to the child experience than the generation before me. I don't think that parents before me had a grasp of the kid's perspective.

Q. How does that experience manifest itself in how you've raised your daughter?

A. I try to strike a balance between being really honest and preserving her innocence.

Q. Are you still enjoying the motherhood experience as much as you were the last time we spoke?

A. To stare down the barrel of the empty nest already is strange. I didn't think I'd be feeling this until about five years down the road. It comes so quickly. The minute you hand car keys to a kid, you're rehearsing for an empty nest.

Q. Does she want to be an actress, or a real person?

A. (laughs) I don't know how to answer that.

Q. She's not heading in a show business direction?

A. Not that I can tell. She's just planning to go to college right now.

Q. What's her major?

A. The number one major – undecided (laughs).

Q. When you go to visit these colleges, does your celebrity enter into the picture?

A. I'm not the right person to answer that.

Q. You're just her mother to these college people?

A. I hope no one thinks of what I do for a living when they see her.

Q. You've done a pretty good job of flying under the celebrity radar.

A. I think of myself as a civilian.

Q. You've made a concerted effort to be a civilian, haven't you?

A. I've tried.

Q. Let's get to your new movie. At what point in the process did you meet Penny?

A. Pretty early on. It was the obvious first step in this journey, after the script was finished.

Q. What were your expectations before meeting her?

A. I don't think either of us fantasized that we would like each other.

Q. Really?

A. Well, I'm about to play her in a movie that will encapsulate her entire life into 120 minutes, and I am going to try to do justice to that life. It gave me extra incentive to want to please her.

Q. Had she read the script?

A. Of course. You don't throw money at a project unless it's been approved. She approved the script, and she approved me.

Q. Did she have approval rights over who would play her?

A. I'm not sure she knew who I was, but she trusted the people behind the movie.

Q. Describe the meeting.

A. You fly into town, rent a car, check into a hotel and call her to tell her you've arrived. You find a time that works best for her, and then get directions from her daughter. She's standing at the door to greet you. I walk in, take a seat, and say hello. But it's unlike any hello ever because I am about to play her in a movie.

Q. Was she wary of you?

A. Of course. This is a great lady who had circled the wagons many times before when people tried to make a movie of her life. Books have been written about her. She wanted to make sure that it was done properly.

Q. Were you as nervous as if you were on an audition?

A. I wasn't nervous, but I was beholden to her. I wanted to do right by her, which is tricky business.

Q. Give me an example of how it gets tricky?

A. She has led such an incredible life, but omissions have to be made to fit it into a two-hour movie. Otherwise, you're going to make a mini-series.

Q. A focal point of the movie is how she was treated by the media and the horse-racing community. That was true, wasn't it?

A. Actually it was worse than we portrayed it. This woman came from a horse-breeding family, and she won the Kentucky Derby the year before Secretariat with Riva Ridge, but magazines and newspapers were running with the housewife angle because it sold copy. It still sells copy.

Q. On the day you met, did she mention any specific concerns she had about how she would be portrayed by you?

A. No. I think she just wanted me to understand that we shared common experiences being women in the sandwich years, with parents who were failing and children who were becoming adults.

Q. Isn't that what this movie is about, more so than a movie about horse racing?

A. We knew the racing crowd would like the movie. We want women to understand that it's a movie about them as well.

Q. When you researched her life, what impressed you most about her?

A. That she never bit the bait. She never became defensive about what people were saying about her. She was stoic. She just went out and did what she did. That couldn't have been easy.

Q. Is that how you played her?

A. Almost. I couldn't be as stoic as her when Secretariat was winning the Triple Crown. I had to show a little crack in the armor. It was too emotional a moment for me as an actress not to show some emotion.

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